ANOTHER SCHOOL YEAR: WHY?

BY JOHN CIARDI

Another School Year: Why?

Although John Ciardi was an accomplished poet in his own right, most people know him only
through his translation of Dante’s Inferno. I discovered him quite by accident, as you will see.

In 1988 or 1989, when I was working at the University of Dallas, I came across an old, mustard
yellow pamphlet while cleaning out some files. The title intrigued me, and I spent a few
minutes reading it. I soon found myself immersed in the ideas and the literary style: This is not
only poignant, but a good read, to boot.

Time passed (as it tends to do). I left UD for Grinnell College, Communicorp in Atlanta, and
then St. Bonaventure. In late 1997, while searching for some words of welcome for the entering
freshman class, I found myself ripping apart my old files, which had been moved several times
in the previous eight years. Alas, the pamphlet was no where to be found.

I sent messages to two list-serv groups, hoping someone could supply a copy for me. No one
could, but several people remembered the essay, and asked me to send it along if I found it.
Others were just intrigued by my description, and eagerly awaited my success. One person
connected me with an archivist at Rutgers University, but she could not find the speech either.

I went to the Internet, searching on Ciardi, and words I remembered from the title. Again,
nothing. But in the Library of Congress I found several references to Ciardi’s biographer,
Edward M. Cifelli, who published at the University of Arkansas Press. Off to the University of
Arkansas press, where I was fortunate enough to find Cifelli’s bio, indicating he was a professor
at the County College of Morris in New Jersey. Hitting their web site, I found other e-mail
names, guessed at the protocol, and sent him a message. He knew the essay, and although he
had just returned papers to the Ciardi estate, told me that what I was looking for was published
in the Rutgers Alumni Monthly, November, 1954.

From there, David Pickens at Rutgers tracked it down, gave me permission to use it here, and
sent me the copy, which I have reproduced here. Believe me, this copy is much more legible
than anything you’ll get from Rutgers, so please don’t bother him with more requests. I believe I
have typed it correctly, but send me any typos you might find so I can correct them (there is no
word missing after downright, by the way). And remember, this was presented to the College of
Men at Rutgers in 1954, which explains the non gender inclusive language.

I hope you agree that my electronic sleuthery was worth it. Without further ado, I present, in its
entirety, the full text of the speech as it was excerpted in the magazine, and later the pamphlet.

Presented to the high school students of New Jersey by their State University with the belief that
those who read and think about the enclosed message will find a real inspiration and a
challenge.

John A. Ciardi, associate professor of English at Rutgers University presented a most inspiring
address at the opening convocation at the Colleges for Men.

Feeling that this address carries a real message to the prospective college student, your State
University is pleased to bring it to you in this pamphlet.
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Mr. Ciardi, one of the foremost American poets, came to Rutgers University from Harvard where
he had served as an assistant professor. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, author of several
well known volumes of poetry and has just published a translation of Dante’s Inferno. This
translation has been well received by the critics and Professor Ciardi is now at work on
translations of the second and third parts of the Divine Comedy.

John Ciardi, associate professor of English, has condensed for the Alumni Monthly his address
at the convocation opening the academic year.

Another School Year: Why?

There was a time when even the faculty knew what made a college. From the time the
university tradition took form in the Renaissance, until the time the faculty committees were first
heard to discuss “Education for Modern Living,” a professor could afford to be downright about
the classics, philosophy, history, theology, mathematics, the sciences, and language study.
Whether the student meant to be a teacher, preacher, doctor, lawyer, or scientist, the core of his
training was essentially the same.

Within the last fifty years, however, colleges have been adding new courses at a fantastic rate.
Consult a college’s catalog for the academic year 1900-1901 and then consult one for 1950-
1951. You will find that where fifty courses were offered in the earlier catalogue, two hundred
and fifty are offered in the later one. This increase in specialization is, of course, implicit in the
nature of the twentieth century technology. Much of it is absolutely necessary if the wheels of
modern living are to be kept turning. Nevertheless, we on the faculty have had many occasions
for head scratching as we read of new developments in education. We have seen the process
one of my former colleagues described as “making Harvard the second-best engineering school
in Cambridge,” and we have seen MIT working to make itself the New Athens of the Humanities.
John Mason Brown once described the MIT process as “humanizing the scientist.” The Harvard
process he described as “simonizing the humanist.”

Nevertheless even a man as dull and insensitive as a professor has something in mind as he
ponders this exploding curriculum and as he faces each new school year. What is a college for?

Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher. It was January of 1940
and I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at the University of Kansas
City. Part of the reading for the freshman English course was Hamlet. Part of the student body
was a beanpole with hair on top who came into my class, sat down, folded his arms, and looked
at me as if to say: “All right, damn you, teach me something.” Two weeks later we started
Hamlet. Three weeks later he came into my office with his hands on his hips. It is easy to put
your hands on your hips if you are not carrying books, and this one was an unburdened soul.
“Look,” he said, “I came here to be a pharmacist. Why do I have to read this stuff?” And not
having a book of his own to point to, he pointed at mine which was lying on the desk.

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New as I was to the faculty, I could have told this specimen a number of things. I could have
pointed out that he had enrolled, not in a drugstore-mechanics school, but in a college, and that
at the end of this course, he meant to reach for a scroll that read Bachelor of Science. It would
not read: Qualified Pill-Grinding Technician. It would certify that he had specialized in pharmacy
and had attained a certain minimum qualification, but it would further certify that he had been
exposed to some of the ideas mankind has generated within its history. That is to say, he had
not entered a technical training school, but a university, and that in universities students enroll
for both training and education.

I could have told him all this, but it was fairly obvious he wasn’t going to be around long enough
for it to matter: at the rate he was going, the first marking period might reasonably be expected
to blow him toward the employment agency.

Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense of duty and I tried to put it this way: “For the
rest of your life,” I said, “your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours. They will
be a little shorter when you are in love, and a little longer when you are out of love, but the
average will tend to hold. For eight of those hours, more or less, you will be asleep, and I
assume you need neither education nor training to manage to get through that third of your life.

“Then for about eight hours of each working day, you will, I hope, be usefully employed. Assume
you have gone through pharmacy school—or engineering, or aggie, or law school, or
whatever—during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills. You will see to it
during this third of your life that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesn’t jump
the fence, or that your client doesn’t go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence.
These are all useful pursuits, they involve skills every man must respect, and they can all bring
you good basic satisfactions. Along with everything else, they will probably be what sets your
table, supports your wife, and rears your children. They will be your income, and may it always
suffice.

“But having finished the day’s work what do you do with those other eight hours—the other third
of your life? Let’s say you go home to your family. What sort of family are you raising? Will the
children ever be exposed to a reasonably penetrating idea at home? We all think of ourselves
as citizens of a great democracy. Democracies can exist, however, only as long as they remain
intellectually alive. Will you be presiding over a family that maintains some basic contact with
the great continuity of democratic intellect? Or is your family going to be strictly penny-ante and
beer on ice? Will there be a book in the house? Will there be a painting a reasonably sensitive
man can look at without shuddering? Will your family be able to speak English and to talk about
an idea? Will the kids ever get to hear Bach?”

That is about what I said, but this particular pest was not interested. “Look,” he said, “you
professors raise your kids your way; I’ll take care of my own. Me, I’m out to make money.”

“I hope you make a lot of it,” I told him, “because you’re going to be badly stuck for something to
do when you’re not signing checks.”

Fourteen years later, I am still teaching, and I am here to tell you that the business of the
college is not only to train you, but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have
thought. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basic look at philosophy, for the community
of the fine arts, for that lesson of man’s development we call history—then you have no
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business being in college. You are on your way to being that new species of mechanized
savage, the Push-button Neanderthal. Our colleges inevitably graduate a number of such life
forms, but it cannot be said that they went to college; rather, the college went through them—
without making contact.

No one gets to be a human being unaided. There is not enough time in a single lifetime to invent
for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human.

Assume, for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls, of say,
MIT, and there cut into stone are the names of the master scientists. The chances are that few
of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones. Yet any one of you who managed to
stay awake through part of a high school course in physics, knows more about physics than did
many of those great makers of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew.
The first course in any science is essentially a history course. You have to begin by learning
what the past learned for you. Except as a man has entered the past of the race he has no
function in civilization.

And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so is it true of mankind’s spiritual resources.
Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books, the arts, and
the techniques of science, are man’s peculiar accomplishment.

When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience. Read Homer and your
mind includes a piece of Homer’s mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of
the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—the list is endless. For a great book is
necessarily a gift: it offers you a life you have not time to live yourself, and it takes you into a
world you have not time to travel in literal time. A civilized human mind is, in essence, one that
contains many such lives and many such worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too
arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the
minds of Sophocles, of Aristotle, of Chaucer—and right down the scale and down the ages to
Yeats, Einstein, E.B. White, and Ogden Nash—then you may be protected by the laws
governing manslaughter, and you may be a voting entity, but you are neither a developed
human being nor a useful citizen of a democracy.

I think it was La Rochefoucauld who said that most people would never fall in love if they hadn’t
read about it. He might have said that no one would ever manage to become a human if he
hadn’t read about it.

I speak, I am sure, for the faculty of the liberal arts colleges and for the faculties of the
specialized schools as well, when I say that a university has no real existence and no real
purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans, with
those human minds your human mind needs to include. The faculty, by its very existence, says
implicitly: “We have been aided by many people, and by many books, and by the arts, in our
attempt to make ourselves some sort of storehouse of human experience. We are here to make
available to you, as best we can, that experience.”

I hope you will want to enter those minds and those worlds that books can give you. That is
essentially what we have to offer. On the letterheads and on the banners, this is Rutgers
University. It is a great university and our pride in it is part of its truest existence. Yet, once

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inside the letterhead and the banner, what we really are, is the Rutgers Reading and Discussion
Society.

I hope you will enjoy the meetings. I hope we won’t have to cancel too many memberships.
Good luck, and good learning.